61 Frames Per Second : persona

Question of the Day: Valkyrie Profile and the Need for Voiced Dialogue

John Constantine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

My backlog is becoming untenable. There are games, games that I started months ago, sitting in a pile that appears to be growing of its own volition. Where the hell did that copy of Pro Evolution Soccer even come from and why is it sitting in the “to play” pile? No one in my home even likes soccer!

The worst of the lot is Persona 4. Rather than hide myself away like some horrid realization of gamer stereotype, refusing to venture into the sun until the game is complete, I’ve been working through Persona since early December, taking it a bit at a time. It’s starting to drive me crazy. A few days ago, I fired it up for the first time since mid-February and was treated to one of its scarce animated cutscenes. Turns out that bear suit made a dude! Yeah, not a dude wearing a bear suit. The bear suit formed a dude inside of it. More startling than spontaneous dude generation was hearing the characters’ voices. I had forgotten they could talk you see. This is because, with very rare exceptions, I always turn off the voice acting in RPGs. Why? Because the voice acting is almost always terrible. Dragon Quest VIII’s British cast and Final Fantasy XII’s gang of breathy stoics are exceptions to the rule. Most of the time, you have to deal with screeching whiners who insist on naming every single thing they do and I’ll have none of it. Honestly though, I wonder why voice is considered a necessity in modern design.

A few weeks back, some folks were pretty upset when Square-Enix said they would not be adding an English voice track to Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume in addition to losing the game’s already completed Japanese voiceovers. A few years back, the entire internet flipped its wig when Eiji Aonuma said The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess would not have spoken dialogue.

My question to you, dear reader, is what’s the big deal? Is voice acting necessary in every game these days? Does it actually make an RPG, or any game really, better or worse when you can hear its characters speaking? Should a game be criticized if it doesn’t have voice? What if it only has limited voice?

Let me know.

Related links:

Question of the Day: Ogre Battle and How Much Tutorial is Too Much?
Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?
Question of the Day: Yu-Gi-Oh! And Card-Based Videogames?
Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Emulate?

Deal of the Day: Persona 4 Only $25 on Amazon.com

Bob Mackey — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Longtime 61FPS readers may remember my personal Persona 4 problem I wrote about way back in December when the game was released; as much as I wanted to play the game, the 100-plus hours I spent with Persona 3: FES told me that P4 had the potential to ruin my life. So, I decided to live a normal, Persona-less life, all while ignoring the existence of a certain game with the number 4 at the end of its title. But, as with all ticking time bombs, this one was bound to explode sooner or later. While doing my normal morning routine of browsing the Something Awful Forums, a thread title nearly made my heart stop: "Persona 4: $25 bucks new, today only." And as much as I didn't want to believe it, checking the Amazon.com link for the game proved both the existence of the sale, and what could be the end of my life as we know it. Let's hope I remember to feed and bathe myself in the upcoming months.

Thanks to E Honda Civic of the SA Forums for destroying me utterly as human being.

Related Links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
Persona 4: Harrowing, True Pre-Order Tales! With Prizes, Prizes, Priz-izes!
Why Do You Keep Doing This to Me, Atlus: Persona Comes to PSP

Why Do You Keep Doing This to Me, Atlus: Persona Comes to PSP

John Constantine — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

I’m currently in month two of my prolonged incarceration. Atlus says that I should buck up. Persona 4 is, apparently, some fifteen hours shorter than its predecessor. Atlus says I’ll be able to go outside again soon. Possibly by this spring! I have hope that Atlus will release from my bonds, loose me from this level grinding, this wandering through randomly generated dungeon after randomly made dungeon. Atlus says I’ll be able to talk to real live people again, and not the pleasant digital avatars it demands I form emotional bonds with. I look forward to that day.

…

Now Atlus tells me it’s remaking the original Persona for PSP. Atlus says that with the game’s new graphics, it can watch me anywhere. At any time. And always keep me close.

SOMEBODY HELP ME! This trailer already has me in its terrible clutches!

Related links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Love: Atlus Reprints Persona 2
Persona 2: Innocent Sin Translation Complete
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES
Whatcha Playing: Persona, Fallout, and the Trans-Pacific RPG Ideal

Home: Your Virtual World Sucks

Bob Mackey — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

So it looks like Sony's Home is having a few problems, though I could have told you this was going to happen a year ago--and smugly, too, because I'm a jerk. But rest assured; I'm not the only one on the Internet who thinks he knows everything. The general consensus with Home since its initial announcement has been "Really? They're still doing that? Well, good for them, I guess." In this case, I think the poor developers can be excused; you have to really feel for them on this project, what with its monstrous scope and need for indefinite maintenance as a permanent beta. What's blameworthy in the whole Home fiasco is the fundamentally flawed idea of a virtual world, which seemed like the coolest idea in the world until we all got computers and discovered all the things we wanted them to do were completely asinine. As a society, we shared a day of lament for ever liking Lawnmower Man.

But back in the early 90s, virtual reality was all the rage; for a ludicrous amount of money, you could put on a digital wetsuit and stumble around in a world of geometric shapes before all the vomiting started five minutes later. And this need for "virtual spaces" eventually moved to the Internet with VRML, a new web language that promised to turn poorly-designed web sites into poorly-designed 3D representations of poorly-designed web sites. But then we all realized this was stupid, useless, and far less intuitive than clicking a mouse to get where you needed to go; the empty gesturing of a virtual world doesn't really add anything aside from draping an unnecessary layer of "reality" over what should be simple actions. Yet, here we are, about ten years after we started knowing better, and Home continues to exist.

It's plain to see why Sony wants Home to succeed so much; to those uninitiated with technology, the idea of a virtual world is an enticing one; and Sony is certainly looking for an audience outside of their hardcore regulars. But I'd argue that even though my mom might find the idea fascinating, if she bought a PS3 for Home (probably the most unlikely thing on the planet), she'd be the victim of virtual sexual assault roughly 10 minutes after logging in. After all, this is what people do with technology--just look at Second Life (don't look at it, please), which has become the Internet's pervert headquarters in recent years. When you give people a virtual world, the first thing they do in it is find innovative new ways to masturbate. But I really don't blame them; I mean, you need something to do while you're there, right? Might as well start touching yourself.

The problem with the idea of virtual space for the sake of virtual space isn't exclusive to Home, though; it's one of the main reasons I've stopped playing quite a few games. Nothing is worse than wandering through giant vistas, towns, etc. with nothing to do from point A to point B just because a design team wanted you to experience a 1:1 ration of what it's like to wander aimlessly from point A to point B in the real world. Series like Persona have realized the problems (and budget concerns) with building a virtual world, and have been using menu-based movement pretty effectively without any tangible loss to the player. Though I guess if walking your fake character onto a fake train to go to a fake store in a fake town is your thing, Home may be up your alley--but it's probably more important to go to your time machine and get back to 1995 before you disrupt the space-time continuum and destroy existence as we know it. Thanks in advance.

Related Links:

Getting Started With Home: A Diary
Heading Home: Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home
Playstation Home: All Your Worst Fears Realized To Hilarious Results

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Love: Atlus Reprints Persona 2

John Constantine — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:15:00 GMT

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I’ve got issues with Japanese role-playing games. I tend to, well, disappear into them. And as much as they make our own Bob Mackey OCD within the confines of their battle systems, item management, and quaint townships, they tend to make me OCD in my waking life. When I start one that really gets its hooks into me, I don’t do much else with life until it’s done. Much like the troubles I had with Dragon Quest VIII back in 2005, Persona 3 ruined me for September 2007. Eighty-nine hours of level grinding, managing completely fictional friendships (whilst ignoring real ones,) and bouncing J-pop that nearly drove my roommates to murder me. It was my first time with the Shin Megami Tensei franchise and I couldn’t have been more impressed, or obsessed, with it.

Needless to say, I’ve been dreading Persona 4. Not because I think it won’t live up to Persona 3. No, I’m afraid of what it’s going to do my brain. And now, for seemingly no other reason than they are awesome, Atlus is making everything worse. The publisher sent out an email today announcing that they are reprinting Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, a Playstation 1 game, “to commemorate the upcoming release of Persona 4 and to thank you for your interest, dedication, and support of the SMT series.”

Who does that?! Who reprints an eight year-old game for a long-dead console? Someone who loves you, that’s who.

You can only get a copy through Amazon and Atlus says copies are extremely limited. Seeing as how original copies go for upwards of a c-note on ebay, I’d suggest you hop to it.

Ugh. My life is over.

(Link: Gamer Tell)

Related links:

RPGs Make Me OCD
Going There: Persona 4 and Feeling the World
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES
Persona 2: Innocent Sin Translation Complete

Going There: Persona 4 and Feeling the World

John Constantine — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Cable television, on the whole, baffles me. Twenty years ago, the joke went that there’s fifty channels and nothing good’s ever on. Now it’s one-thousand channels. You do stumble on something great here and there, though. For example, I watched three episodes of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern this past weekend. The deal is that chef Zimmern travels all over the earth and eats every bizarre local delicacy he can get his hands on. It is awesome. In one episode, he went to Iceland, and dined on puffin. I was fascinated. Not by the unusual choice of fowl, but by the process and ritual behind how puffins are hunted. Puffin hunting is apparently an old, Icelandic father-son bonding tradition. The men go out to one of the insanely remote islands where puffins nest and they catch them with small nets on the end of giant poles. It’s all they eat for days. They hunt on the edge of huge cliffs beside the ocean.

Naturally, this got me thinking about videogames.

Persona 4 is coming out in the United States in December. The Personas, and every title in their parent franchise Shin Megami Tensei, are intensely Japanese games, steeped in religious iconography distinct to the archipelago. The games’ common motif, modern urban Japan, is foreign but still familiar thanks to the way Japan is commonly depicted in western media. People think of Tokyo when they think of Japan. Persona 4, however, is going to be as alien to the average American as puffin hunting. The game is set in rural Japan, a choice intended to evoke nostalgia according to the developers. But how do you translate that idiosyncratic experience to a player who isn’t Japanese?

The nostalgia, the image of a simpler life meant to recall summer vacations and innocence for Japanese Persona players, can carry over to anyone in the world because the game can put them there, in that place, and let them explore. The emotional tone can be influenced by visual and aural cues and then the player can experience it for themselves. Andrew Zimmern showed me Icelandic tradition, he explained its history to me. But he couldn’t let me feel it, touch that place.

I can see a game.

I could press start and be me. I’m in New York, but I decide to move to Iceland. I need a change. So I have to find transport. I find a plane, I find a boat, I find a way to get there. Then I make my life. Get a little of that Will Wright, Sims action here. Let me find a home, find work, learn the language, find a wife. Let me get to the halfway point and have a son. Then have the whole game shift gears, go from sim to adventure game. Let the game be about my great-grandson living his life. He could bring my great-great-grandson puffin hunting.

This is what games can do. The experience of a culture, the experience of a place, an experience most likely cut-off from you, can be touched. Not read about, not seen. Touched.

Isn’t that exciting?

Related links:

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS

Persona 3

I’ve written about Persona 3’s disturbing imagery before: “It’s always strange when games filled with truly troubling imagery go unnoticed by the most vocal anti-game pundits. Persona 3, Atlus’ exceptional RPG in the long running Shin Megami Tensei series, has been released not once but twice in the past twelve months without eliciting even a peep out of Joe Lieberman or Focus on the Family. For those unfamiliar with the game, the reason Persona 3 might ruffle some feathers is its protagonists, a team of troubled high school students who control guardian spirits to battle demons. And oh yeah, they release these spirits by shooting themselves in the head.” Seriously! Teens! Shooting themselves repeatedly in the FACE! No one even said anything about all the teens shooting themselves in the face. — JC

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Metroid II is about xenocide; your goal is to slaughter an entire alien species. Yes, there are many games about destroying evil alien species. Usually, though, said species are attacking the Earth or something. Or they're at least competent to make moral decisions. Metroids are space jellyfish. They're not evil, they're just hungry. And the series storyline establishes pretty clearly that the Space Pirates are breeding the things for their own evil ends. Exterminating the Space Pirates would be one thing, but the Metroids are mere low-functioning animals. As you proceed through the game, you watch a steadily declining count of how many of the poor little bastards you have left to vaporize. Imagine if this thing was set in a nature preserve. — PS

Fable

Peter Molyneux may not have delivered on his promise of creating the greatest role-playing game of all time with Fable but it was still a remarkably forward thinking game. Consider this: Fable was released in the United States on September 14th, 2004, a mere four months after Massachusetts started issuing same-sex marriage licenses and two months before senatorial, congressional, and presidential elections where constitutionally banning same-sex marriage was a tent pole issue. I applaud Molyneux for creating a game where a man can fall in love and marry another man. But I am shocked that Fable didn’t cause videogame content to be another talking point that election season. — JC

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The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC

Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators

Fast-food promotional games are pretty fucked up, as a whole. Selling this nasty grub to kids via smiling cartoon characters and hop-and-bop platforming — well, it may not cross over into "immoral", but it's certainly sleazy. The 1992 McDonald's promo-piece Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators, however, crosses that line by hopping onto the kid-friendly environmentalism in vogue at the time. (See also Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc.) The problem here is that McDonald's' own environmental record was far from clean; as a massive distributor of factory-farmed beef, the company was (and is) directly responsible for a huge amount of pollution, deforestation and energy wastage. Bastards were cutting down the same sparkling-green rainforests through which their grinning shills were merrily traipsing. — PS

Heavenly Sword

It might seem strange that we’ve chosen to single-out Heavenly Sword as our example of an absurdly over-sexualized female protagonist. Dead or Alive, a series that’s persisted for just over a decade now without causing a kerfuffle despite its bizarre, hyper sexuality, might seem like a more logical target. You might even say that Heavenly Sword’s a poor example considering its emphasis on Nariko’s empowerment in a male dominated fantasy world. But let me ask you, if Nariko is such a great warrior, savior of her people even though they hate her for being a woman, why does she go to war in her underpants? She is fighting people with swords in her underpants. No one thought mention to developer Ninja Theory that underpants are not effective armor? Nariko stands in for the legions of silly, objectified, hyper-sexualized female game protagonists. We’re giving Lara the day off on this one. — JC

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Click here for Part 3

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:11:00 GMT

Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine

NARC

I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith

Pokémon

Have you ever noticed that there are no regular, powerless domesticated animals in any of the Pokémon games, cartoons, comics et cetera? Let's say your pre-teen brother/sister/cousin goes out for a walk one day and comes across a pigeon in the street. They then capture this pigeon in a small cage and train it to fight the dogs, lizards and ponies that the other neighborhood kids have captured and trained to fight, as well as stray cats and sewer rats that can then be captured and trained for similar purposes. Yeah, that scenario is a little awesome, but it's also pretty horrifying, right? When Michael Vick is involved in a dogfighting circuit, the media explodes with rage, but when your kids do it in a Nintendo game it gets rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. — Derrick Sanskrit

Final Fantasy Tactics

As much as Final Fantasy Tactics’ tale of political intrigue in the feudal fantasy-scape of Ivalice is concerned with a power struggle between church and state, it’s hard to get past the game’s barely veiled indictment of Christian lore. Tactics' villains are essentially the Catholic Church. Their central figure is Saint Ajora, a 'child of God' with twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him and sent him to his death. 'Cept it turns out Ajora wasn't really the son of God, but a power-hungry war-mongering mortal who was sneakily made divine through church skulduggery and historical revisionism. Good thing RPGs require so much reading, otherwise there might have been some good ol’ fashioned game burnings back in 1998. — JC

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Click here for Part 3